


Your Love Alone

by dimtraces



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Triple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 21:52:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11655441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: Savage loves the idea of a brother, and Maul the affection he can't accept or refuse. That's why it works.





	Your Love Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: References to both of their backstories, nothing explicit.

Savage loves him long before they meet. He loves the face in a distorted crystal ball and the name and the desperate claws that greet him, and what he thinks of the person attached does not matter, at first, because what else is he to do with a brother but love him? (He has no choice. There is no-one else left to forgive Savage.)

It’s the only way. There are no feelings for a weapon. If his brother’s love had come with expectations, Maul wouldn’t have known how to meet any of them, and he wouldn’t have wanted to anyway.

> 

Maul will never love him, until he suddenly does. The danger creeps up on him, in a thousand meals and in soft words and in hands that do not bring pain. In hands that never stop, even while he attempts desperately to scare them away. (Maul knows he shouldn’t, but he loves all the ways in which his brother is unlike everything he’s ever believed in.)

It’s the only thing that helps. The Mother’s spell has torn him from his community and his body and his mind, but in those small moments where he is permitted kindness, Savage still exists.

< 

Savage learns to color in the shape of the word _brother_ that looms between them, until he forgets that Maul isn’t the person he was looking for. Who he is becomes more important than what he might have been. He’ll never be Feral, and it doesn’t hurt.

Maul doesn’t notice when the balance tips from taking into giving. He’s too busy dragging his injured brother away from danger, and if he holds onto the remaining hand for slightly too long, then it’s only because he wants to make him shut up, he thinks.

They love each other.

It’s almost enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to take a short break from obsessing too much over the almost done next part of Runaways 'verse, and then I spent an entire week screwing around with details of the phrasing & then with other bits to keep every part at 100 words......
> 
> Title's from Your Love Alone is Not Enough by Manic Street Preachers.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
